Mini-Update: Improvements to Compatibility, Accessibility & Upcoming Features (Patreon)

Hey Patrons, we are back with another update about how our development has been progressing!

February was another big one for emulator compatibility, especially so with our buffer cache rewrite being merged to master. This merge allowed us to proceed with our previously teased Hardware Accelerated ASTC decoder, which right now you can find in Early Access builds. Check out our previous post for information on this new feature. 

This month also brought us many graphical fixes, including but not limited to a fix for games affected by BGR (Blue-Green-Red) rendering problems. Affected games included Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Pokkén Tournament DX, Octopath Traveler, and Dragon Quest 11. With this fix, many of these games now render perfectly on yuzu. 

Super Smash Bros. Ultimates Jumbotron BGR issues are now fixed:

We also began the process of adding native mouse and keyboard support to our emulator. 

While we have allowed mapping keyboard input for a long time, we have heard your many requests for a native mouse to thumbstick mapping solution. That is exactly what we have added with the implementation of mouse panning. This feature allows users to map mouse input for thumbstick movement. Not only does this allow you to use your mouse to control in game camera/aiming, it also allows proper sensitivity based on mouse movement, similar to the level of input given by a thumb stick's analog properties. When paired with our "Emulate Analog with Keyboard Input" option (Controls/Advanced), we believe this offers one of the best native mouse and keyboard experiences possible in an emulator. Also note that in a recent update, we also now allow the mapping of common mouse buttons (LMB, RMB, MMB Click, Forward and Back).

Moving to performance enhancements, this month also brought some great improvements to yuzu. By fixing a bug in Dynarmic (our dynamic recompiler for ARM) performance was greatly improved in many games. You'll find a list of a select few below

• Absolute Drift
• Angry Video Game Nerd 1 & 2 Deluxe
• Cecconoid
• Cobra Kai
• Dustoff Z
• Fight
• Foregone
• Gleamlight
• JDM Racing 2 
• Johnny Rocket 
• Jump the Rope 
• Monster Hunter Rise Demo 
• My Hidden Things
• Shing 
• Spiritfarer 
• Supper Robot Wars 
• Windbound

In addition to this fix and thanks to recent GPU optimizations, Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition is close to doubled in performance, though we expect this change to also benefit many other games.

To finish, we want to talk about an exciting new update, which our talented developers are currently working on at the moment. Our new shader decompiler rewrite!

Now, while our current decompiler is very functional, it does have some downsides. For example it is inefficient, it generates sub optimal code and it's hard to make changes to it without breaking storage buffer and the tracking of bindless textures. Due to these inefficiencies, we currently have issues in several games while decompiling shaders. A few examples of games affected are Fire Emblem Three Houses, Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity, and Persona 5 Strikers.

The aim of the new decompiler is to fix these issues relating to shaders. We hope to have more news to share on this rewrite in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for further updates!

Hopefully you all enjoyed this mini-update. Once again thank you for your continued support, without which none of this would be possible!

- The yuzu development team